Change is a funny thing; you can’t know what will matter to you in the years to come. When I look back at photos I took in previous decades, I find so many elements, sometimes just small features of the … Continue reading →

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In analog photography, the image is invisible and remains hidden on the film until it magically appears during development. Poetry can remain in our minds like a latent image. Here is a poem I wrote about this phenomenon. Latent … Continue reading →

Nostalgia can be described as a sentimental longing for the past. It comes from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain) and is thought to have been derived from Homer’s The Odyssey. With baby boomers reaching their senior years, nostalgia seems to be their drug of choice. … Continue reading →

Whenever you begin something new, you tend to learn a lot in a short time. Here are 3 insights I gained in my earliest years of photography: I learned to expect the unexpected. Things sometimes happen quickly when we are composing a … Continue reading →

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Mark Hewitt Johnson is an accomplished Toronto photographer who has been active for over forty years. He is a life-long student of the photographic medium who has wide ranging and eclectic interests. I enjoy and admire his work, not … Continue reading →

Projects

My second book: "No Money Down - Toronto (1980-1986)" documents the city of Toronto, Canada, in the 1980s. It is available through Blurb Books and Amazon.

From the introduction: "Looking back now at the photos some thirty years later, so much comes back to me about being dropped into a new environment. We use our creative tools as extensions of ourselves; they help us understand and define our place in the world. For me, having a camera in my hand at all times helped me remember: You only get to do this once. We have to take the time to see it as clearly as we can."
Derek Flack writes in blogTO, "Woolaver's work is so fascinating--a record of Toronto with a soul."

My first book: "Toronto Flashback (1980-1986)" documents the city of Toronto, Canada, in the 1980s. It is available through Blurb Books and Amazon.

Woolaver grew up in rural Nova Scotia and moved to Toronto in 1980 to study photography. He did a lot of street photography in those years, capturing street scenes with fresh eyes. Michael Amo writes in the introduction, "When Avard arrived in Toronto in 1980, he brought that watchfulness with him, that deep-seated empathy for humans going about their solitary business, a simultaneous loneliness and delight in our ceaseless effort to remake the world in our own image."